Gordon Campbell in his Scoop column "On bin Laden, Petrobas and Jon Stephenson":
One of the main features of New Zealand's post-Cabinet press conference yesterday was Prime Minister John Key’s extraordinary ad hominem attack on independent journalist Jon Stephenson, of Metro magazine.
Recently, Stephenson wrote an article in Metro alleging that New Zealand was not meeting its Geneva Convention obligations in its handling of prisoners captured in the course of SAS operations in Afghanistan.
You might think that as the only NZ journalist who has regularly been reporting from Afghanistan, Stephenson speaks with some authority.
Not to the PM, who wrote off Stephenson’s credibility by citing to the press gallery an incident when Stephenson allegedly impersonated TV3’s Duncan Garner in order to get Key on the phone. End of story, for Key.
Had Stephenson been finding it hard to get through to Key by more conventional means ? No, Key didn’t think so.
On the issue of prisoners and their treatment, Key preferred to believe the two in-house reports by then Chief of Defence Forces, Jerry Mateparae, and the MoD, which – unsurprisingly – had found no case to answer about the activities of the forces under their command.
Some of the points at issue in this dispute seem to be semantic. Article 12 of the Third Geneva Convention says flatly:
“Prisoners of war may only be transferred […] to a Power which is a party to the Convention and after the Detaining Power has satisfied itself of the willingness and ability of such transferee Power to apply the Convention.” Afghanistan signed up to the 1949 Geneva Conventions in 1956, and late in 2009 it also acceded to the 1977 Additional Protocols I and II, which protect victims of international conflicts and civil wars. Has New Zealand really “satisfied itself” that the Karzai regime would treat prisoners decently – and if so, how?
That’s where the semantics kick in. Can New Zealand troops be said to be responsible for the capture and transfer of prisoners, if and when this occurs in the context of joint operations – when it can say that it was its Afghan colleagues who were the actual captors of the people at risk of subsequent torture and ill treatment?
For Mateparae and the MoD to be credible, one would have to conclude that the SAS have never taken prisoners, and never been a party to the taking of prisoners – subsequently at risk of torture or mistreatment – in all the years that the SAS has been operating in Afghanistan.
Somehow, I don’t think Jon Stephenson is the party with the credibility problem here.
Jon Stephenson is a research associate of the Pacific Media Centre.
Pacific Media Watch
